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Sen. Dan Coats (R, Indiana) to retire at end of term.

A bit of a surprise, which hopefully doesn’t mean that the man is ill. I’ve certainly heard no rumors of scandal associated with Sen. Daniel Coats (R-IN)53%, and you usually hear those things ahead of time; the Senator is in his early seventies, and has been in various federal public offices since the late Eighties, so possibly Dan Coats is simply ready to retire.

The good news about this race is that there’s a good talent pool on the GOP side to replace Dan Coats*: the Democrats have precisely one good candidate (former Senator Evan Bayh), and he’s not all great of one. Here’s a clip of Bayh, back in 2010, calling the then-supermajority Democratic Congress an utter failure at job creation:

The Democratic party has gotten to be rather intolerant of any sort of heresy since then; and that party has gotten into the remarkably useful (to us) habit of breaking their candidates in public. Assuming Bayh runs, within six months he’ll be just another pandering, liberal Democrat in a state that has gotten less friendly to that sort of thing. It should be a hoot to watch.